To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Third Floor

Room 3114 had a window that faced a brick wall.

By the third day I knew every crack in the mortar.

They gave me platelets from a bag, and then more, and my nosebleeds stopped.

The bruises on my shins turned from purple to green.

I stayed on the third floor of the cancer center, tied to a pole, with a mask on my face.

I wasn't allowed to be alone, so I never was.

My father slept in the recliner.

On the second night Marge arrived with a pillow and a casserole, found him in it, and stood over him with her arms crossed.

"Dale Pinkney, you're taking up the whole chair."

"It's a chair for one person."

"You are one person. I'm another. I don't see the problem."

"The problem is that I was here first."

"The problem is that you snore like a bus in a tunnel."

"I fix buses, Marge. I'm qualified to say that is a compliment."

I lay in the bed with my eyes shut and listened to them with enormous joy.

By the fourth day they had divided the room into territories.

He got the chair and the window, and she got the rocker from the family lounge and the end of my bed.

They took turns reading me the sports page and the church bulletin, and they argued about both.

Fraser came in the evenings from the shop, smelling of cedar, and sat on the floor against the wall with his boots off.

On the fifth day, Teddy showed up with a sheet of plywood.

It was four by eight, and he had carried it up three flights because the elevator was full of gurneys.

"Teddy," I said through my mask. "You cannot bring lumber into a cancer ward."

"It's pine. It's very clean."

"Is that a rule?"

"I asked a nurse. She laughed and said she'd pretend she hadn't seen it."

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